United States

Large vision–language models (VLMs) commonly process images at native or high resolution to remain effective across tasks. This inflates visual tokens to 97-99% of total tokens, resulting in high compute and latency, even when low-resolution images would suffice. We introduce \emph{CARES}—a \textbf{C}ontext-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{R}esolution \textbf{S}elector, a lightweight preprocessing module that, given an image–query pair, predicts the \emph{minimal} sufficient input resolution. CARES uses a compact VLM (350M) to extract features and predict when a target pretrained VLM&#39;s response converges to its peak ability to answer correctly. Though trained as a discrete classifier over a set of optional resolutions, CARES interpolates continuous resolutions at inference for fine-grained control. Across five multimodal benchmarks spanning documents and natural images, as well as diverse target VLMs, CARES preserves task performance while reducing compute by up to 80%.

ACL 2026

CARES: Context-Aware Resolution Selector for VLMs

21st edition of EANN (International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks) should be held in Halkidiki, Greece. Due to current Covid-19 situation the conference will be held virtually and Underline will host a repository of video talks and preserve them for the future. Videos will be released on Underline one day after the conference. 

EANN 2020

Large vision–language models (VLMs) commonly process images at native or high resolution to remain effective across tasks. This inflates visual tokens to 97-99% of total tokens, resulting in high compute and latency, even when low-resolution images would suffice. We introduce \emph{CARES}—a \textbf{C}ontext-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{R}esolution \textbf{S}elector, a lightweight preprocessing module that, given an image–query pair, predicts the \emph{minimal} sufficient input resolution. CARES uses a compact VLM (350M) to extract features and predict when a target pretrained VLM's response converges to its peak ability to answer correctly. Though trained as a discrete classifier over a set of optional resolutions, CARES interpolates continuous resolutions at inference for fine-grained control. Across five multimodal benchmarks spanning documents and natural images, as well as diverse target VLMs, CARES preserves task performance while reducing compute by up to 80%.

technical paper

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. <br>
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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, often through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT is resource-intensive, relying on large curated datasets, rejection-sampled demonstrations, and uniform optimization across all tokens—even though only a fraction carry meaningful learning value. In this work, we explore a counterintuitive idea: can smaller language models (SLMs) teach larger language models (LLMs) by revealing high-value reasoning moments that reflect the latter's unique strength? We propose LightReasoner, a novel framework that leverages the behavioral divergence between a stronger expert model (LLM) and a weaker amateur model (SLM). LightReasoner operates in two stages: (1) a sampling stage that pinpoints critical reasoning moments and constructs supervision examples capturing the expert's advantage through expert–amateur contrast, and (2) a fine-tuning stage that aligns the expert model with these distilled examples, amplifying its reasoning strengths. Across seven benchmarks, LightReasoner improves accuracy by up to 28.1%, while reducing time consumption by 90%, sampled problems by 80%, and tuned token usage by 99%, all without relying on ground-truth labels. By turning weaker SLMs into effective teaching signals, LightReasoner offers a scalable and resource-efficient approach for advancing LLM reasoning.

LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning?

On-device deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently leverages Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) to support diverse downstream tasks under tight resource constraints. To address the limited storage capacity of mobile devices, recent works have explored model merging techniques to fuse multiple LoRAs into a single one. In practice, however, LoRAs are often delivered incrementally, as users request support for new tasks (e.g., novel problem types or languages). This scenario introduces a new challenge: on-device online continual merging, where the objective is to incorporate new LoRAs while preserving the performance on previously supported tasks. In this paper, we propose a data-free and computationally efficient strategy for selecting and merging LoRAs when a new one becomes available, assuming the device can store only a limited number of adapters. Extensive experiments across real-world tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to alternative strategies while adhering to the storage budget and compute limitations of on-device settings. The project page is available at: https://donaldssh.github.io/K-Merge.

K-Merge: Online Continual Merging of Adapters for On-device Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) require frequent knowledge updates to reflect changing facts and mitigate hallucinations. To meet this demand, lifelong knowledge editing has emerged as a continual approach to modify specific pieces of knowledge without retraining the entire model. Existing parameter-editing methods struggle with stability during sequential edits due to catastrophic forgetting. While retrieval-based approaches are proposed to alleviate this issue, their applicability remains limited across various datasets because of high training costs. To address these limitations and enhance scalability in lifelong settings, we propose LightEdit. Our framework first selects relevant knowledge from retrieved information to modify the query effectively. It then incorporates a decoding strategy to suppress the model’s original knowledge probabilities, thereby enabling efficient edits based on the selected information. Extensive experiments on ZSRE, Counterfact, and RIPE benchmarks demonstrate that LightEdit outperforms existing lifelong knowledge editing methods. Furthermore, by minimizing training costs, LightEdit achieves cost-effective scalability, enabling easy adaptation to various datasets.

Towards Scalable Lifelong Knowledge Editing with Selective Knowledge Suppression

Generating high-fidelity synthetic tabular data remains a critical challenge for enhancing data availability in privacy-sensitive and low-resource domains. Recent approaches leverage LLMs by representing table rows as sequences, yet suffer from two fundamental limitations: (1) they model feature dependencies densely, introducing spurious correlations; and (2) they assume static relationships between features, ignoring how these dependencies vary with feature values. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SAGE (Sparse Adaptive Guidance), a novel LLM-based generation framework that enforces sparse and dynamic dependency guidance. SAGE discretizes features into value-aware pseudo-features and constructs a mutual information-based sparse dependency graph. This graph adaptively guides generation through explicit context selection or implicit logit correction, enabling LLMs to focus on truly relevant information during synthesis. Our extensive experiments across six datasets and multiple tasks reveal that SAGE not only improves data fidelity and downstream utility, boosting F1 scores by 10\% compared to previous LLM-based methods, but also reduces policy violations by one point. These results highlight the importance of adaptive structure in tabular data generation and provide new insights into context-sensitive control of LLMs.

SAGE: Sparse Adaptive Guidance for Dependency-Aware Tabular Data Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Machine Translation (MT), applying them to linguistically complex domains-such as Social Network Services, literature etc. In these scenarios, translations often require handling non-literal expressions, leading to the inaccuracy of MT metrics. To systematically investigate the reliability of MT metrics, we first curate a meta-evaluation dataset focused on non-literal translations, namely MENT. MENT encompasses four non-literal translation domains and features source sentences paired with translations from diverse MT systems, with 7,530 human-annotated scores on translation quality. Experimental results reveal the inaccuracies of traditional MT metrics and the limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge, particularly the knowledge cutoff and score inconsistency problem. To mitigate these limitations, we propose RATE, a novel agentic translation evaluation framework, centered by a reflective Core Agent that dynamically invokes specialized sub-agents. Experimental results indicate the efficacy of RATE, achieving an improvement of at least 3.2 points in combined system- and segment-level correlation with human judgments compared with current methods. Further experiments demonstrate the robustness of RATE to general-domain MT evaluation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/BITHLP/RATE.

Beyond Literal Mapping: Benchmarking and Improving Non-Literal Translation Evaluation

Iterative refinement is a simple inference-time strategy for machine translation: given an initial translation, an LLM revises it without additional training. Yet document-scale refinement remains poorly understood: 1) which pipelines work best, 2) what quality dimensions improve, and 3) how refiners behave. In this paper, we present a systematic study of document-level literary translation, covering six LLMs and seven language pairs. Across nine translation-refinement granularity combinations and five refinement strategies, a) we find a robust recipe: document-level MT followed by segment-level refinement yields the strongest and most stable improvements. In our setting, doc-level refinement often makes fewer edits and leads to smaller or less reliable gains. Surprisingly, a simple general refinement prompt consistently outperforms error-specific prompting and evaluate-then-refine schemes. b) Fine-grained MQM analyses and professional-translator evaluation show that gains come primarily from fluency, with limited improvements in adequacy. c) Probing translator-refiner strength interactions suggests refinement behaves less like targeted post-editing and more like projecting outputs toward the refiner's learned distribution while remaining anchored to the initial translation.

What Does LLM Refinement Actually Improve? A Systematic Study on Document-Level Literary Translation

Structured pruning offers a hardware-friendly approach for efficient LLM inference. Early static methods determine fixed subnetworks through offline calibration, suffering from performance degradation and calibration sensitivity. Recent methods explore input-adaptive pruning by selecting a subset of tokens as probes to estimate hidden activations for online pruning decisions.
However, existing probe selection strategies fail to identify outlier-triggering tokens, and uniform layer-wise sparsity misaligns with heterogeneous outlier distributions, leading to critical channels being incorrectly pruned. Therefore, we propose OCP (Outlier-Centric Probing for structured pruning), a principled framework that prioritizes capturing outlier-triggering tokens rather than reconstructing full hidden distributions. Specifically, OCP includes three key components: (1) sensitivity-weighted probing for FFN layers that identifies outlier patterns via precomputed weight aggregations, (2) attention-accumulated probing that leverages preceding attention matrices to identify salient tokens, and (3) online adaptive sparsity allocation that dynamically adjusts layer-wise pruning based on history-guided outlier statistics. Extensive experiments on LLaMA2, LLaMA3, and OPT demonstrate that OCP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across benchmarks, achieving up to 25\% perplexity reduction at 1.6$\times$ speedup.

OCP: Outlier-Centric Probing for Dynamic Structured Pruning of LLMs

Although artificial intelligence (AI) shows growing promise for mental health care, current approaches to evaluating AI tools in this domain remain fragmented and poorly aligned with clinical practice, social context, and first-hand user experience. This paper argues for a rethinking of responsible evaluation -- what is measured, by whom, and for what purpose -- by introducing an interdisciplinary framework that integrates clinical soundness, social context, and equity, providing a structured basis for evaluation. Through an analysis of 135 recent *CL publications, we identify recurring limitations, including over-reliance on generic metrics that do not capture clinical validity, therapeutic appropriateness, or user experience, limited participation from mental health professionals, and insufficient attention to safety and equity. To address these gaps, we propose a taxonomy of AI mental health support types -- assessment-, intervention-, and information synthesis-oriented -- each with distinct risks and evaluative requirements, and illustrate its use through case studies.

Responsible Evaluation of AI for Mental Health

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, evaluating repository-level reasoning, the ability to maintain logical consistency across massive, real-world, interdependent file systems, has become critical. Current benchmarks typically fluctuate between isolated code snippets and black-box evaluations. We present RepoReason, a white-box diagnostic benchmark centered on abductive assertion verification. To eliminate memorization while preserving authentic logical depth, we implement an execution-driven mutation framework that utilizes the environment as a semantic oracle to regenerate ground-truth states. Furthermore, we establish a fine-grained diagnostic system using dynamic program slicing, quantifying reasoning via three orthogonal metrics: $ESV$ (reading load), $MCL$ (simulation depth), and $DFI$ (integration width). Comprehensive evaluations of frontier models (e.g., Claude-4.5-Sonnet, DeepSeek-v3.1-Terminus) reveal a prevalent aggregation deficit, where integration width serves as the primary cognitive bottleneck. Our findings provide granular white-box insights for optimizing the next generation of agentic software engineering.

From Laboratory to Real-World Applications: Benchmarking Agentic Code Reasoning at the Repository Level

Current conversational agents often follow static learning paradigms and miss the implicit, evolving feedback embedded in users’ follow-up behaviors. We propose IEvoAgent, an evolving conversational agent framework that leverages the structured dependency between agent responses and user reactions. We construct an annotated dataset from LMSYS-Chat-1M and WildChat and find consistent response-conditioned feedback patterns. Based on this finding, IEvoAgent uses a conditional feedback distribution matrix to estimate expected feedback rewards, combining offline KTO alignment with an inference-time prompt-evolution mechanism driven by a dynamic matrix. Experiments on MT-Bench-101, WildBench, and FB-Bench show improvements over open-source baselines, indicating that mining implicit feedback supports better multi-turn alignment under evolving user preferences. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Hualeez/IEvoAgent.

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